How to use locations to inspire your writing

London’s West End has always been close to my heart, so it felt natural to set my debut novel, She Came To Stay, there. My parents arrived in England from Cyprus in the 1950s and, like many immigrants, worked for years in Soho.  Years later, I spent 20 years working in the West End, too. In the fifties, my mother was a seamstress and my father a waiter, but many Cypriots started their own businesses – clubs, bars and cafes. It’s this glittering, grimy life I wanted to portray in She Came To Stay.

Anchoring scenes in actual places gives them authenticity – particularly useful if your plot has dramatic turns as mine does. It also helps readers believe that they’ve entered this world with you.

The first location I was keen to portray was the café Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. Established in 1926, it was a huge part of my own life because for several years during my twenties I worked just a couple of streets away and would visit every morning, either with friends or alone. With its cosy, almost illicit atmosphere, it was the perfect place for my main character, Dina, to have secret meetings with her boyfriend.

Bar Italia, the cool café on Frith Street in Soho, opened its doors in 1949 and gave me the idea for the Coffee Corner. Though the latter is nowhere near as lovely as the stylish Bar Italia, I used the idea of a recently opened café run by immigrants, employing others who’d also just arrived. When you’re a stranger, I think you gravitate towards others in the same situation. The same applies to food stores that provide a taste of home. The wonderful Lina Stores deli, which was among the first to sell ‘continental’ goods in Soho, features in the book because an Italian grocer’s is exactly the sort of place Dina would have shopped. Italians and Greeks share similar cultures, and there would have been a familiarity here for her.

Sometimes my research inspired actual scenes, and this was the case with St Anne’s Church (between Wardour and Dean Street) which suffered two blasts in 1940 and a third in 1944. It wasn’t unusual for locals to walk past ruined buildings every day, as it took months, sometimes years, to clear and rebuild the city. I used the bombed-out churchyard as the setting for the first heart-to-heart between Dina and Bebba, where they both reveal fragments of their shattered pasts.

When I learned that there was a five-day lethal smog in December 1952, I decided to use this event as the climax to my plot (a real event can help give your story the ring of truth). The smog fell over the whole city, but when I saw a drawing of St Pancras station, I realised this building, with its gothic grandeur and its spires wrapped in toxic smog, would be one of the most frightening places to visit during that time.

It was exactly the foreboding location I was after, so I used it for a central scene in the book. Train stations are wonderful, daunting places. Imagine arriving in the 1950s, not speaking the language, with just a suitcase in hand, looking up and seeing this vast, beastly structure.

With thanks to writer and host of the Literary Sofa, Isabel Costello, where a longer version of this blog first appeared.

Buy She Came To Stay from Amazon, The Pitshanger Bookshop or your local bookshop.